Would Jesus Do An Exegesis?

Often, when I ask someone if they meditate, I hear things like, “distance running is a meditation for me.” Though such responses miss the mark, I usually let it go at that. However turning hunting into a meditation is a mockery of the art that must be called out.

Of course, no self-respecting hunter would want to talk about hunting and meditation in the same lifetime, much less the same sentence. But under the guise of heightened awareness, a hunter declaims a clearly meditative state:

“Hunting stills the hunter’s self-regard. Make very little of yourself if you wish to see clearly. Shut up, deeply, if you wish to hear…the hunt produces a state of mind, a kind of undifferentiated awareness otherwise difficult to attain.”

How perfectly contradictory! How clever to camouflage the atavism of hunting as an awakening of awareness! Though it should go without saying, a human cannot grow into a human being by clinging to the barbarisms of man.

Native Americans apologized to an animal before killing it; they said to do so afterward is too late. Modern hunters with no need to kill except for the pleasure of the hunt and the kill feel no need to apologize for their barbarity. Their hubris gives them the right.

Disregarding the Sixth Extinction, and speaking about awareness without a scintilla of self-awareness, the hunter exclaims, “A prerequisite for the pleasure of hunting is scarcity of the game.”

It’s no better, and in some ways worse if the hunt is with a net for butterflies, which are also in precipitous decline. Taking up a hobby from childhood in adulthood, the man displays childishness:

“Decades after hunting for butterflies in far fields, my sweetheart spread our beach towels on the open porch after a swim, and soon we found them shingled with fritillaries, dozens happily feasting on the salt of our sweat and batting their orange and silvered wings in the sun.”

“Within the month I had restocked my childhood armory — net, killing jar, spreading board, pins, display cases — and was again out roaming the fields.

Why? What am I doing?”

What indeed, except trying to recapture the lost innocence and misguided pleasures of childhood?

He goes on to say, “Over the years I have given up the killing jar and the pins. The one thing I have not yet discarded is the butterfly net. I carry it in part to catch and release the few things I can’t identify on the wing but mostly because of the way it changes the way I walk…for me, walking with the butterfly net alters my perceptions.”

That sounds reasonable, if weird. But it reflects the kind of casuistry one expects to encounter from Jesuits. The need to identify, as well as the hunter’s theory of perception, has nothing to do with direct perception, and everything to do with maintaining the frames of thought and foolishness of man’s persisting predation on nature.

It’s difficult to set our tools down and simply be in a place. After all, man’s tools have allowed Homo sap to dominate the earth and make every animal our prey. To rationalize the decimation of our fellow creatures by contextualizing it in nature’s primeval predator-prey dynamic is lunacy. Man is a predator without a niche; having no place in nature, he makes prey of everything, even butterflies.

The author hones his words not to uncover the truth, but to cover and conceal the savagery of man destroying the natural world:

“Without the net, I have few links between my imagination and the outer world. With the net, I form an image inside me, and even if nothing appears to match it, I have a point of contact.”

In actuality, the image denies relationship with nature or with another human being. The image, like the tool, must be set aside for unmediated perception and true relationship to be.

The cunning rationalizations become inversions of the truth, and the tools of words become instruments to further the reach of human darkness:

“Without the net, I am interested only in some future time and place to which I am headed with quickening breath. With the net, I pause and conduct a full search of each milkweed head; without the net, my gaze glides over the surface, absorbing nothing.”

Nothing could be more wrong, and wrongheaded. The net, literally or metaphorically (whether used to catch butterflies or ensnare young teens in its algorithms), does not capture to release, but to imprison the heart and mind.

To perceive what is one has to set aside the things of the mind and hand. But hunters often speak in mystical terms, lest their bloody intentions are themselves perceived:

“Often I find myself staring in a seizure of wonder at some simple thing — a disc of moss on the path, a column of ants in a crack of dried mud, deer scat in sunlight — that I would never have seen so clearly or with such surprise if I were not hunting for something that is not those things and is not there.”

So the mentality of killing or capturing is necessary to perceive essences that cannot be killed or captured? That is philosophical and spiritual nonsense, and it enlarges the endarkenment of human consciousness.

What perceptions beyond the net reveal is precisely the opposite of what the author believes. The mind only truly sees when it drops the net and leaves the Net.

The fact that the hunter has moments of meditation as a byproduct of the demands of the hunt to “apprehend what is in front of me” is a sad commentary on the inability to observe nature without diverting the mind through indulging in its primitive destructive habit to kill or capture.

The intentions and goals of the hunt are antithetical to the intents and goallessness of awareness and perception.

Martin LeFevre

Link:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/30/opinion/butterfly-hunting-attention.html

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